THE LAST ROYAL REBEL The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth
Anna Keay
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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Bloomsbury Publishing An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK
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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Š Anna Keay, 2016 Maps by John Gilkes Anna Keay has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 447 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-2782-6 ePub: 978-1-4088-4608-7 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
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Contents Map
ix
A Bird’s Eye View of Whitehall Palace
x
The Lineage of the Duke of Monmouth
xii
Author’s Note
xv
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Abduction An Infamous Mother A New Life Homecoming Vicious and Idle Coming of Age The Soldier and the Sun King A Rising Sun Care But Not Command The Ties Begin to Break Finding New Friends Icarus Exclusion Opposition Leader Town and Country Desperate Measures Love and Loss The Reluctant Rebel The Last Battle The End
1 13 35 45 64 84 106 130 151 165 185 204 226 246 265 286 309 329 349 364
Epilogue
377
Notes
389
Bibliography
435
Acknowledgements
447
Index
449
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Chapter 1
Abduction
O
n a cold December evening in 1657 an English army officer loitered in the backstreets of Brussels, intent on abduction. His target, walking close by the side of an expensively dressed young woman, was an eight-year-old boy with dark eyes, a bright, animated face and brown hair that lay in soft curls on his shoulders. The magnificent city of Brussels, which had once been home to the dukes of Burgundy, was now the capital of a satellite state of Spain, the Spanish Netherlands. From within the Coudenberg Palace, looming high in the darkness on its rising ground, a Spanish governor-general administered the region, brushing past the catafalque of the city’s last Habsburg princess, Archduchess Isabella, as he went about his business. From its tapestried halls, his despatches were carried daily to his royal masters in Madrid. Below the palace, in dimly lit alleyways, lurked the kidnapper, Sir Arthur Slingsby. Here, among inns, brothels and merchants’ mansions, lived his client – a man who called himself King Charles II. He was the eldest son of the recently executed King Charles I, and grandson of both James I / VI of England and Scotland and Henry IV of France. But with his kingdoms now commanded by Oliver Cromwell, he had no government to instruct, no army to command, no palaces to occupy; his title was, in truth, more aspiration than actuality. Slingsby’s quarry was Charles II’s own son. His instructions were to take the child from Charles’s former lover, the notorious
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Lucy Walter. But as the kidnapper made his move, rather than a stealthy abduction, a violent public fracas unfolded. Wild screams of maternal horror drew crowds as Slingsby attempted to wrench the boy from his mother’s arms. Lucy’s desperate cries – whether of love, or of cold determination, it was impossible to tell – echoed between the tall houses in the still, night air, receding only after the appalled onlookers intervened and carried mother and son to safety. News of the incident spread swiftly across Europe, and a fortnight later King Philip IV of Spain received a detailed account of the event, which his agent described as ‘most barbarous, abominable and unnatural’.1 But Charles himself felt no such qualms. He now considered the woman to whom he had clung in ecstatic abandon eight years before a dangerous liability, bent, as he put it, on ‘ruining her innocent child by making a property of him to support herself in those wild and disgraceful courses she hath taken’. This was Charles’s second attempt to snatch the child, and it would not be the last. The boy, whose name was James, would one day become the Duke of Monmouth. Now, as so often, he represented something extraordinary to those around him. His short but spectacular life would be as magnificent and as mesmerising as fireworks. For thirty-six years he would light up the firmament, inspiring by turn delight and disgust, adulation and abhorrence and, in time, love and loyalty almost beyond fathoming.2 To understand how this royal child had come into the world at all, and what a world it was, involves retreating ten years to the mid-1640s. Charles II was then still Prince of Wales, the seventeen-year-old heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Brought up in the rarefied world of the Stuart court, he had seen his universe turned on its head when civil war had broken out between his father, Charles I, and his subjects. The causes, though complex, stemmed largely from the king’s determination to impose his florid and ceremonious form of religious worship on his three kingdoms. This was anathema to many of his subjects who preferred the simpler
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worship ushered in by the Protestant reformation. For four years Charles I fought the parliamentary army in a series of battles across the middle shires of England, before he was finally defeated. During these years his son and heir Charles had turned from twelve-year-old bystander to active participant. In 1645, aged fifteen, the prince had been given nominal command of the royalist forces in the west of England. But the men he oversaw were no match for the increasingly professional and well-trained parliamentary army. Pushed further and further west, until he was pinned down in the south-western tip of Cornwall, he was finally forced to leave England in March 1646. As the prince sailed, Charles I had tried to bargain with his opponents, until, undone by his own intransigence, he was taken prisoner. The young prince reached Paris in July 1646. Though this was the France of Louis XIV, the French golden age was yet to come: the Sun King was a boy of eight and Versailles still a hunting lodge. During this French minority political power had been vested in the hands of a regent, Louis’s mother Anne of Austria, who was guided in everything by the powerful Italian prelate Cardinal Mazarin. Prince Charles’s mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, was the sister of the recently deceased Louis XIII and, being a ‘daughter of France’, had been warmly welcomed by her sister-in-law. Given apartments in the main royal palace of the Louvre, a summer residence at St Germain-en-Laye, and a substantial allowance, Henrietta Maria had established a new centre of gravity for the exiled royalists. It was to her court that Prince Charles reluctantly travelled in the summer of 1646. Having already seen more than someone of his position might expect in a lifetime, Charles was at sixteen tall and dark and developing a fledgling moustache. He had the height of a man but had yet to throw off the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At eighteen he was described by a contemporary as ‘one of the most gentle, innocent, well-inclyned Princes, so far as yet appears, that lives in the world [with] a trimme person, and a manlie carriage’.3 On his arrival in France in the summer of 1646 he joined his mother
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in the suburban splendour of St Germain-en-Laye, which from its long ridge commanded the plain on which Paris stood. At the court entertainments and balls that their royal mothers arranged for Prince Charles and King Louis, the young first cousins shuffled awkwardly, straitjacketed by protocol, and remained silent rather than risk dishonouring their families. As Paris smouldered with France’s own political protests, the Fronde, in England Charles I was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, while his younger son, James Duke of York, made a daring escape from the parliamentary army disguised as a woman. All the while the Prince of Wales was consigned to playing pet to the great ladies of the French court, ever in the eye of his mother. Confined to his chamber by illness in the winter of 1647, Charles’s frustration must have been acute.4 Then suddenly, in June 1648, everything in England seemed set to change. With the king captive and incapable of compromise, the possibility that there might be no reconciliation between Parliament and monarchy had started to become horribly real to both sides. As the moderates were being squeezed out of the parliamentary regime, the country began to enter uncharted territory. It was far from clear what would happen should Charles I continue to refuse the rebels’ demands. Many of the possible answers were unthinkable. A royalist backlash ensued. Parts of Kent broke into open rebellion against Parliament, and one of the most senior naval officers in the land, Sir William Batten, declared for the king and led a dozen warships, the bulk of the parliamentary navy, into mutiny. But a navy alone could not retake the kingdom: land forces were needed. Clear that ‘it is Scotland, and Scotland only [that] can save the King’, Charles I’s Scottish supporters galvanised. A week later, on 9 July, the king’s principal Scottish adviser – his ‘polar or northern starr’, the Duke of Hamilton – led an army of 10,000 men over the border to mount a challenge to Cromwell. With both an army and a navy suddenly unexpectedly in play, the king’s prospects were transformed. Unable to act himself, he sent from his prison on the
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Isle of Wight the orders for which his son had been waiting: at last Prince Charles was to enter the fray.5 All the ports along the south coast of England were firmly in parliamentarian hands, so the naval mutineers made instead for Holland, where they were allowed to moor at the Dutch docks at Hellevoetsluis. The Prince of Wales was to travel to Holland and take command of the ships. Then, somehow, he was to join forces with the Scots. Much remained unclear. Acutely conscious of the need to ensure his teenage son had experienced advisers about him, the king dispatched a flurry of letters to his various councillors – most in retirement while the prince lived with his mother in France – with orders to go to him in Paris. But the slow movements of these middle-aged administrators were no match for the speed of a young man with great deeds in his sights. As Sir Edward Hyde, the privy councillor appointed to guide the prince, forced gouty feet into his boots on Jersey, Charles was already hurrying through the ceremonies of departure from the French court.6 A week later he rode out of Paris with his first cousin, Prince Rupert, at his side: brilliant, brave and ten years Charles’s senior, no companion could have added more to the sense of eager anticipation than this swashbuckling soldier.7 By 19 July, Charles was in Calais, where he learnt that his brother, the fifteen-year-old Duke of York, had already reached Hellevoetsluis and was taking command of the fleet himself.8 Any intention of waiting for the councillors to gather was abandoned and Charles and Rupert sailed at once for the Dutch Republic. They reached Hellevoetsluis shortly afterwards, and as the Prince of Wales boarded the English flagship, the thousand men of the fleet cheered with delight.9 But despite the drama and exhilaration, the immediate departure for which he longed was not possible. Practical concerns intervened to force a delay: food, drink and supplies were needed to sustain an invasion fleet, while positions of command had to be filled and a plan agreed. Such matters would require the financial assistance of Charles’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, and a few days’ organisation. A week at most: but what a week it would prove to be.
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Hellevoetsluis, the Dutch equivalent of the English naval headquarters at Chatham dockyard, stands on the north side of one of the great ragged inlets that perforate the Dutch coast. Here channels had been cut and berths hollowed out of the sludge at the water’s edge to allow the ships of the formidable Dutch navy to berth safely – protected by the inland position and the town’s substantial defences. Exactly forty years after these events, Charles’s nephew, William of Orange, would set sail from these very docks to invade England. Though it was ideal for preparing invasions, the port had little else to recommend it, and so with provisioning under way, Charles abandoned its briny streets and an hour or so later was riding along the elegant boulevards of The Hague to visit his younger sister, Mary.10 Only eighteen months apart in age, Charles and Mary had grown up together. As was normal for royal offspring, they and their siblings had lived in their own royal palaces away from their parents. Here they were waited on by their own staff – at first nurses and ‘rockers’, later governesses and tutors – and shared with one another the sort of warmth and companionship which children of their position seldom received from their parents. Charles and Mary had played and prayed together in the state rooms of St James’s and Richmond palaces, and hand in hand learned the complex manoeuvres of court dance from their French dancing master.11 When Mary had been just nine she was married to William of Nassau, the teenage son of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. She arrived in Holland in 1642 to find herself a child alone in a foreign land, loathed and lied about by her manipulative mother-in-law, Amalia van Solms, and able only to look on as her beloved family’s troubles unfolded across the Channel. The happiness felt by brother and sister at their reunion in The Hague in July 1648 must have been intense. A week of delay was turned into a week of delight, as an impromptu family reunion took place, drawing together in the palace of the Binnenhof, a moated complex in the middle of the city, a whole generation of young Stuarts. Charles, Mary and her husband William, and their brother
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James, Duke of York, were joined by their slightly older cousins, Prince Rupert and two of his brothers Maurice and Philip, whose mother, Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, had been living in exile at The Hague for thirty years. An official dinner was held at the palace, at which the cousins dined in state and every courtly nicety was observed. A rail divided the dining table from the rest of the room, against which the citizens of The Hague pressed to gaze at this impossibly glamorous gathering. The festivities flowed on long after the formalities had ceased, hosted by Mary’s husband William II of Orange – who, at twenty-two, had already established a reputation for gambling, drinking and womanising.12 Finally delivered from the controlling eye of his mother, and still without the services of Sir Edward Hyde thanks to the intervention of a band of pirates off the Dutch coast, Charles was, for perhaps the first time in his life, completely free from supervision. This sense of liberation, cut with the anxious anticipation of what lay before him, proved a powerful aphrodisiac. The young prince spent one of those warm summer nights entwined with a beautiful, knowing young woman of his own age. The relationship was brief and would have been entirely inconsequential, but for the fact that when he sailed out with his navy on 26 July, she was pregnant.13 The woman was Lucy Walter. The circumstances of her affair with the prince and her subsequent reputation might conjure up an image of a bawdy backstreet girl, but this was not how her story had begun. Eighteen years earlier, when the cannons of the Tower of London had sounded to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Wales, Lucy had been born in Pembrokeshire, in the south-western corner of Wales. There her father was a landowner of some means, possessing some hundred acres including Roch Castle, a small but handsome medieval tower house that still stands pertly on a rocky outcrop a mile from the sandy western shore. The Walters were a respectable gentry family with good connections – her mother’s uncle was the Earl of Carbery – and despite the remoteness of their Welsh estate they retained ties to London and its fashions.14
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Though Prince Charles underwent the stiff and formalised upbringing of an heir to the throne, he witnessed in his parents a marriage of genuine love and fidelity. Charles I and Henrietta Maria’s engagement had been as much a matter of politics as any of its age, and the two had been married by proxy long before they actually met, but their initial frostiness melted and affection blossomed into love. The harmony and happiness this brought the royal couple – despite the horrors contemporaries ascribed to the influence of the Catholic queen – was palpable. Even in the bleakest moments of the civil war the king would sit down to write warm and loving letters to his wife. In adulthood Charles II would become a byword for infidelity, but it was not for want of example. Lucy’s experience could not have been more different. Her childhood was dominated by the violent and destructive relationship between her mother and father. According to Lucy’s mother, Elizabeth, William Walter was a serial adulterer who began an affair with their maid when Lucy was six. The maid gave birth to two illegitimate children while still living with them, for whom Elizabeth then had to provide. When she protested, William responded with brutality – verbal and physical – and then abandoned her. Encouraged by her friends and family, Elizabeth eventually fled Wales with her three children, and made for London. There she pursued a case for financial support and a legal separation from her husband.15 In 1641, when Lucy was eleven, her parents’ lawsuit reached the House of Lords. It was decided in Elizabeth’s favour. William Walter’s property was sequestered and he was ordered to pay his wife £60 a year for the care of their children. But her victory would be short-lived. After four more troubled years, during which the civil war raged, the Lords again considered the case and were sufficiently convinced by William Walter’s counter-claims against his wife – including reciprocal allegations of adultery and abandonment – that in 1647 they reversed their original decision. It is hard to know now where the truth lay in these embittered mutual accusations. William Walter was clearly a violent brute, but Elizabeth Walter seems also to have been a poor role model, and even
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her own family would accuse her of failing her daughter. Whatever the truth of it, few children could have had a bleaker experience of relations between men and women than poor Lucy Walter.16 The sting in the tail of the Lords’ final decision in the Walters’ case was that the couple’s children were ordered to return to their father ‘for their Keeping and Education’. This dreadful prospect provoked immediate action and at some point in 1647 Elizabeth Walter and her daughter Lucy made their escape and sailed for Holland.17 The small, sorry farce of the Walter family was played out against the epic backdrop of the civil war. As the royal palaces had been looted, and Rubens’s magnificent altarpiece was ripped from Henrietta Maria’s chapel at Somerset House, so Roch Castle was burned by royalists. For Lucy and Charles, as for many others in this extraordinary age, certainty and stability evaporated and they were thrust into premature adulthood. By the time the House of Lords ordered that she and her brothers should return to their father, Lucy was seventeen and already ravishing. Even those who despised her – and in time there would be many – conceded that Lucy was bewitchingly beautiful. With long glossy black hair, pale skin and full red lips, she caught the eye immediately. She was not particularly accomplished – the domestic events of the previous years had interrupted her education – but she had both a coquettish charm and a quick, knowing manner that proved irresistible to men.18 She was also ambitious, despite – or perhaps because of – the poverty and disarray brought about by her parents’ separation: a provincial gentry girl who aspired to the elegance and opulence of the London elite. She longed for jewellery, fine clothes and beautiful, expensive things. Her enemies would later accuse her of becoming a prostitute and while such a stark description seems harsh, she soon began to acquire wealthy suitors who were prepared to spend money to enjoy her company. Among them was the second son of the Earl of Leicester, a brilliant twenty-fouryear-old parliamentary colonel called Algernon Sidney who, it was claimed, was willing to part with fifty pieces of gold in her pursuit.
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When Sidney’s regiment was suddenly mobilised the two parted, never to meet again. But he must have been reminded of his time with her when, thirty-five years later, the earl was introduced to her son, James, and the two started to talk of treason.19 Elizabeth Walter had a series of brothers and sisters to whom she had turned when her marriage collapsed, and it was her sister Margaret, and Margaret’s Dutch husband, Peter Gosfright, who facilitated her flight to Holland with Lucy in 1647, where they travelled under the alias ‘Barlow’. Not long after their escape Margaret was arrested. Behaviour that might have been overlooked in wartime London met with stern disapproval in the Protestant trading towns of the Netherlands. Peter Gosfright’s family took a dim view of the pair and were scandalised when Mrs Walter returned to London leaving her teenage daughter alone in Holland, already ‘in an ill way of living’. With connections and charm, and with the Dutch towns home to hordes of downhearted English royalists, Lucy made friends fast. Within months she was installed as the mistress of one of the most eligible, the Earl of Leicester’s third son, and Algernon’s younger brother, the handsome royalist exile Colonel Robert Sidney.20 Whether it was Lucy who pursued Prince Charles, when he came to The Hague in July 1648, or Charles who sought out Lucy, is not clear. According to one source Charles was the predator, who ‘hearing of her, found means to get her from her Collonel, she not being averse to so advantageous a change’. On the other hand Lucy was much the worldlier of the two and the young Prince of Wales was a spectacular conquest. Either way, the pair seems to have been equally willing. Robert Sidney was quickly cast off – muttering bitterly that as Lucy was ‘already sped’ (no longer a virgin) anyone was welcome to her – and the affair was consummated.21 Consumed by the prospect of reclaiming England and rescuing his father, the Prince of Wales probably thought little of Lucy Walter as he sailed out of Hellevoetsluis less than a week later.22 The reality of what he found in England would be a sorry substitute. Entering
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the Channel, the fleet had been unable to land at any of the southeastern coastal forts. After weeks of indecision and infighting of the sort the teenage prince lacked the experience or authority to resolve, and a spell blockading the Thames, Charles’s forces ran out of supplies and by September they were back in Hellevoetsluis. There the awful news greeted them that the Duke of Hamilton’s army had been defeated by Parliament’s best general, Oliver Cromwell, on a rough moor north-east of Preston. Two thousand of Hamilton’s 10,000 men lay dead and three times as many captured. The heroic royalist recovery they had all believed in was all but over. The five months that followed were no better. Though it had failed, the royalist uprising had been a reminder of the loyalty most people still felt to the king. As the Prince of Wales docked in the Netherlands that September a parliamentary deputation set off from Westminster to visit Charles I at Carisbrooke Castle. They came with a mandate to agree terms within forty days that would reinstate the king but with checks on his power. The conditions included the militia being put under parliamentary control for a limited period and the establishment of Presbyterianism. The commissioners, and the majority of the political class, were desperate for Charles to accept so that peace and order could be restored and the real radicals kept from power. They had reason to worry, as the soldiers of the army were enraged by tales of the commissioners trading their hard-won victories for lucrative posts in a new royal regime. But the forty days expired with no agreement. The commissioners wept with frustration at the king’s refusal to concede. The army demanded the treaty be abandoned and Charles I tried for treason. Knowing that the House of Commons, even now, would not vote to try their king, a small group of radicals took matters into their own hands. On the morning of 6 December, when the MPs began arriving at the Palace of Westminster, the London brewer turned parliamentary officer, Thomas Pride, stood defiantly on the steps. Behind him, with their swords drawn and muskets at the ready, was a contingent of the 7,000 soldiers who occupied London. In Pride’s hand was a list of all the moderate MPs; as each one arrived, each was either turned away or
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arrested, so only the radicals remained. This act of political cleansing, known as ‘Pride’s Purge’, saw the House of Commons reduced by half; only when it was done was the seal set on the king’s fate. The remaining MPs, the ‘Rump’, could now push through their measures and moved to put the king on trial. The House of Lords, implacably opposed, was simply ignored. A High Court of Justice was established and the king was summoned to Westminster Hall to answer the charge of making war on his own people. Like many vanquished leaders tried for their alleged crimes, Charles I refused to recognise the authority of the court and would not register a plea. No plea was taken as confirmation of guilt. The Prince of Wales spent the nail-biting months between September and January at The Hague. Though he lodged in princely splendour with his sister and brother-in-law in the Binnenhof, he was powerless. In November, as the forty-day period ended, he lay incapable in isolation, his body covered in the rampant pustules of smallpox.23 When he recovered, now reunited with Sir Edward Hyde and the rest of his council, he had experienced men about him, but lessons learned in the past had little application in this radical new world. As events in London unfolded, and the implications of a trial became clear, the prince despatched increasingly desperate letters to the crowned heads of Europe, begging them to intervene, emphasising the terrible precedent the execution of a king would set for all monarchs. A blank page, ready to receive any terms, bearing the signature ‘Charles P’ at the bottom, survives with the eighteenth-century inscription: ‘Prince Charles his Carte Blanche to the Par[liamen]t to save his Father’s Head’. But it was all to no effect. The radicals were now unstoppable.24 On the morning of 30 January, Charles I was marched across the park from his son’s former rooms at St James’s Palace, where he had lodged during his trial. From the principal audience chamber of Whitehall Palace, the Banqueting House, he walked out onto a timber stand where the executioner waited. Charles had already assumed the glassy calm of the martyr, and was serene as he laid his pale neck on the block. As the executioner raised his axe the crowd froze, and as it fell monarchy was no more.25
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An extract from
THE LAST ROYAL REBEL by ANNA KEAY
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